When the rubber hits the road

This roundtable, organized as part of Tempest’s 2025 education series, brings together three veteran organizers to discuss the on-the-ground work of organizing against political repression, for Palestine solidarity, and in the workplace by putting the tradition of socialism from below to work. 

Tempest will continue to publish talks from this year’s education series, including primers on Marxism, socialism from below, Anti-racism and abolition, internationalism and anti-campism, the rank and file strategy, organizing, feminism and LGBTQ liberation, and others. These talks are intended to serve as an introduction to Tempest’s core political agreements.

Aileen: Hey, happy to be together with y’all. My name is Aileen. I’m a member of the Tempest Tucson branch. Thanks to the education committee for taking up the planning of this event. I’m really hoping to learn a lot from folks. Even after preparing for this talk, I feel like I still have five million questions.

As someone who considers themselves newer to organizing and to being a part of a political home, I’ve been wanting to have conversations about how socialism from below actually shows up in the nitty gritty of our everyday organizing, when we’re developing proposals, campaigns, talking to coworkers and community members. I want to really begin to understand how that’s showing up.

I was tasked with speaking on socialism from below in today’s anti-repression organizing specifically. Anti-repression organizing didn’t begin under the Trump administration. Political repression is the calling card of the ruling class, so nothing that I’m about to say is particularly new. But for the sake of time, I’m going to focus on the parts of anti-repression organizing that are coming up in this era of MAGA McCarthyism in the geographical context of the U.S. I’ll focus on Arizona, where I’m located, and on organizing and campaigns in which I’ve directly participated. For me, that’s mostly been in the realm of higher education, especially in relation to the attack on academic freedom, and the further criminalization of the Left in Tucson.

Before offering the reflection on that organizing, though, I wanted to establish some context and talk about the characteristics of our conditions: The political repression we are seeing is the violent consequence of capitalist catastrophe. As the quality of life decreases, the contradictions of capitalism become more and more clear. And as more people fight back, the state comes down harder on all who they deem a problem in this fantasy of neverending wealth. Academics, socialists, leftists, Palestinians, Muslims, labor organizers, trans people, queer folks, migrants, people of color, the disabled, the working class, and the poor are all under attack as the state attempts to stop all dissent and moves deeper into authoritarianism.

The effectiveness of this repression, however, which for me has felt shockingly swift and chaotic and characterized by preemptive compliance and capitulation, comes only after years of Democrats twiddling their thumbs and appeasing donors by refusing to provide any meaningful opposition to the right-wing establishment.

More specifically, it is Palestine, as Eman Abdelhadi says, that held “a mirror to every institution in our society and exposed the gaps in the rights that we are told that we have.” When universities violently shut down the encampments that shot up following Columbia’s action back in April of 2024, and they rejected the right of students, faculty, and staff to speak and protest on Palestine, they set the bar in literal Hell for defending DEI, critical race theory, and the right to protest, not to mention keeping ICE off campus and protecting international students.

So that’s the context we’re organizing in today. Organizers like Lelo Juarez and Mahmoud Khalil can be detained and, in the case of Lelo, deported by ICE. Professors like Tom Alter and countless others can be fired for speaking about critical race theory, Palestine, socialism and supporting trans people. The National Guard can be launched at the will of Trump to squash dissent in cities like LA and DC.

And yet—with virtually no support from the institutions that claim to defend our right to education, speech, life, and dignity—people continue to fight back under these dire conditions. Mahmoud Khalil was released only after months of public pressure, and protests that spoke to both the urgency of Palestinian liberation and the right to protest. The committee to defend professor Tom Alter, who was fired for his remarks at a socialism conference, has launched calls to action, a toolkit, and multiple forums for discussion about unjust dismissal. At the same time, rapid response and community defense networks have popped up all over the country to fight back against ICE and protect immigrant communities through observation, Know Your Rights trainings, and mass actions to stop deportations.

Here in Tucson, I’ve been a part of organizing at the University of Arizona with the group UA Resist, which arose as a direct response to the implementation anti-DEI policies that resulted in the firing of my comrades and coworkers, and has most recently taken up the fight against the higher education compact that Trump issued to nine universities, of which we were one of the lucky few.

Our strategy has been to try and mobilize campus by connecting with others—organizing one-on-ones and using classroom zaps, and direct actions in hopes of protecting the spaces and rights of students. We are one of the only wall-to-wall groups on campus that’s made up of students, faculty and staff, and we have a large contingency of Tempest members in the organization, many of whom are on this call.

Beyond the university campus, two of my comrades were subject to political targeting in relation to an anti-ICE protest that occurred this summer. They were arrested and initially held on charges of criminal damages, riot, and terrorism. A small group of Tucson community members have since put out statements, but we have not launched a larger campaign around this. Instead, we have prioritized a discussion around what this means for us, around risk and organizing in Tucson.

As I begin to reflect on all these projects, there’s one question that I keep coming back to: What is the task of revolutionary socialists who embrace the tradition of socialism from below and who are organizing against political repression?

This is my attempt at an answer.

One, we need to build solidarity on college campuses. We need wall-to-wall efforts. Faculty need to take seriously the role of providing mentorship and maintaining legacies of radicalism and militancy alongside staff and students.

Also, we need to understand and convince people that the university has always been this way, has always had these lukewarm takes on free speech. There isn’t going back to a time where due process existed and our constitutional rights or free speech were ever really defended.

We do this not in order to squash a vision of what the university could be, but to put forth a better one and to build solidarity amongst people who have been experiencing repression on college campuses since before this particular era of political repression. This also means that we need to build coalitions with organizations who are more liberal while providing critical intervention so that we don’t move right and deeper into institutional means of resistance.That’s something that’s been coming up a lot at the U of A, as students take different lessons from different people on campus, some liberal and others more radical.

Two, we can’t rely on institutions to save us. Socialism from below demands not that we wait for Trump to go away—which I have been told verbatim by my supervisors and others who have capitulated to the consolidation of the cultural center that I work at—but that we try and build the independent power needed to win concessions from the ruling class in organizing against political repression.

This means that we can’t wait for the courts to rule in our favor or our universities to grow a backbone and stop capitulating to donors and trustees. We must put forth a convincing vision of a liberated world in all of the spaces that we struggle in—our unions, organizing groups, community defense networks, etc., so that the institutions that we’re a part of seem less and less inevitable and natural. Anti-repression struggles are key to this. They expose the deep hypocrisy of this country’s so-called freedom and have the ability to mobilize a large swath of people under radical demands.

Three, we need to fight for full democracy in our organizing spaces. Anti-repression organizing is facing head-on the terrifying scale and power of the state. Under these conditions, it’s easy to fall into the trap of closing ranks, of keeping quiet and softening that radical edge in hopes that we don’t get put on some list somewhere.

But we’re probably already on a list. Of course, we want to prioritize people’s safety and to avoid infiltration, but what the hell does it mean to be safe right now? In the case of targeted political repression such as that of Tom Alter and my comrades, it is of course important to consider the consent of the individual targets. However, we have to be careful that the measures for safety and security are not countering the building of mass political power.

Otherwise, we’re doing exactly what the state wants us to do. Safety or the closest we can get to it is in numbers and in direct democracy. It is much harder for one person to infiltrate and take over a group if it’s impossible for one person to hold all the power to begin with. That means that revolutionary socialists need to be able to defend and argue for pro-democracy structures within organizing and to mitigate the power imbalances that almost always come up when you’re organizing in crisis.

Four, we must build confidence and agency. The fact that nobody is coming to save us is a devastating but important conclusion to arrive at, especially for those newly radicalized like the students and staff that we are working alongside at UA Resist. We Tempest members who are in that organization lead with the politics of socialism from below because we take seriously the fact that there is no substitution for the working class and that we are all capable of having agency.

To build someone’s confidence means pushing and mentoring people to do things. We are building trainings on organizing, facilitation, and media. We do most things in committees so that people can actually learn from each other. We have a low bar of entry but expect everyone to participate, vote, and put forth proposals. Of course, it’s not perfect, but confidence comes with practice and that’s what we’re trying to carve out—the space to practice.

Further, it is the role of socialists, radicals, everyone fighting against oppression, to convince and demonstrate to people that we must have confidence in each other, that together we can actually build the safety nets that will protect us against repression as it attempts to turn our lives upside down. It’s a lot easier to take big risks when you know people can confidently have your back. Leftists are being targeted, and that risk is real, but the safety net we can build in the face of that is more powerful than the protection anyone will get from facing charges alone, taking small meetings with university administration, or preemptively complying to authoritarianism.

I want to end by saying, these are scary times. I’m shaking in my boots. But all we have is each other. And we’re full of contradictions, fear, hope, and, most importantly, a hunger for a better world. I still have so many questions, and I’m excited to hear from people today in the discussion about how our politics are showing up in your organizing.

Sherry Wolf: Thanks Aileen for kicking us off so effectively.

I’ve been tasked to talk about organizing in the context of the Palestine movement in this country. But, first of all, I’ll introduce myself: I’m based out of Brooklyn and am a longtime revolutionary socialist. I helped found Tempest back in the summer of 2020 or whatever. I’m a union organizer by trade during the day, and too many evenings and sometimes on weekends, over at Rutgers. I’m also a longtime member of Jewish Voice for Peace and have been much more active with them, for obvious reasons, over the last couple of years.Palestine was my entry point to Marxism, to politics really, at the age of 18—entered a Zionist and left a revolutionary.

Two years into the genocide—and I think that we have to see this ceasefire as another phase of the genocide—the Palestine movement in the U.S. is definitely both bigger and broader than it’s ever been, but it’s also more diffuse and lacking, just like the rest of the Left in this country, spaces for strategic debate and organized collective planning.

I think we have to start by acknowledging what our movement has succeeded in doing, and that is mobilizing hundreds of thousands—probably, at this point, millions—of people into the streets and shifting the consciousness of tens of millions of people. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the automatic connection to the politics of default Zionism, which had been the politics of everybody in this country for generations, is dead for the current generation and future generations. That is a result of the genocide and also of the movement that was built globally and in this country to combat it, to expose it.

Our weaknesses also have to be acknowledged. The movement is really splintered without a common understanding or strategy to sever the U.S.-Israel bond that obviously has enabled the ongoing occupation of Palestine. And in New York City, where the movement has been largest and perhaps most dynamic nationally because of the demographics of the city, Mamdani’s victory raises new strategic questions for a movement that’s accustomed to full opposition from Democrats. And so this is new terrain in some ways for the movement.

I want to frame the conversation by saying that how we approach or how somebody approaches questions of why Israel occupies Palestine and is committing genocide and why Western as well as regional powers collaborate with the occupation and the genocide deeply influences the strategy and the tactics that we choose to take within our movements. We can’t disconnect our bigger framing of the problem and the resistance from what strategy and tactics look like on the ground.

In broad strokes, I think understanding the conflict overall, some in the U.S. on the far right, but also many on the broad Left, share an understanding of U.S. support for Israel, and it’s being given more expression lately, especially through the replaying of the conversation between Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson.  But, unfortunately, this has echoes on the Left. The argument runs that U.S. support for Israel is a result of the Israel lobby and powerful Jews with influence in the media, government, and business.

There certainly is a powerful Israel lobby that spends lavishly and has been doing so for decades. But they do so as an extra-governmental body reinforcing U.S. geopolitical interests and power. We understand in Tempest, and I understand as a Marxist, that a focus on the Zionist lobby, and through that the power of Jewish capital, not only reinforces antisemitic tropes, but it flies in the face of the evidence to the contrary. Israel has historically not been a drain on the U.S. empire but a gift to it. It serves as a watchdog, a mercenary nation run by a what is effectively a religious junta, carrying out vast experiments in social control, torture, and ethnic cleansing that are exported around the world, including to the U.S. via police departments in major U.S. cities.

It was Biden back 40 years ago who said that if Israel didn’t exist, we would have to create it. What was he talking about when he said that? Earlier in that decade, the Secretary of State Alexander Haig described Israel as an aircraft carrier for U.S. imperialism.

How we view this occupation does influence what your tactics are. As Marxists, Tempest members understand that there’s a mutually beneficial relationship between Israel and the U.S., and that support for Israel is a means of controlling the world’s oil spigot and thus a significant part of the global economy.

How we understand the resistance also frames what kind of movement politics, tactics, and strategies we try and play out. As socialists, we believe that any population under occupation has the right to resist in any way it sees fit, and that the violence of the oppressor and the violence of the oppressed can never be equated. However, support for the right of armed resistance does not mean support for the political perspectives and the orientations of any particular group or party that is carrying out those tactics.

This is not a perspective that is necessarily shared on the movement Left in this country. But the support for the right to resist should never be confused with support for the political perspectives and orientations of the various Palestinian political parties, including Hamas. None of these parties—Fatah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine—offers a political strategy that has thus far over these decades been capable of winning the liberation of Palestine. And many on the Left, along with mainstream political parties, don’t view the Palestinian masses themselves and the regional working classes and oppressed peoples as the forces capable of winning the liberation of Palestine. Instead, they’re looking to alliances with the region’s political elites and the ruling classes who have accommodated imperialism, most recently codified through the Abraham Accords, with UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and others.

In the largest Left group that many of us are familiar with in this country, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), they do seek political alliances with regional powers. But it’s not necessarily that you pick one or the other. Groups like PSL frame the dispute in this way, and they also see street actions and protests as means of amplifying some of the political leaders’ perspectives in that fight. They view the governments in Iran and Syria and, before that, in Libya as allies in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, even if these same regimes have oppressed Palestinian populations and pursued policies hostile to the interests of the oppressed and working classes, it’s their hostility to the U.S. government that, for some organizations on the Left, supposedly places them in proximity to the Left.

Even if you look further at pushes in our movement to reject calls to globalize the intifada or slogans like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” that are emerging from circles on the Left, including coming from Mamdani, they’re in essence rejecting the historical perspective of the Palestinian liberation movement that has long called for dismantling the state of Israel and fighting for the establishment of a democratic secular state, from the river to the sea.

A rejection of these slogans is usually the forerunner to accommodation with Zionists and the Zionist state. When the movement starts policing its own slogans for being too radical and not appealing to liberals or endangering a politician’s standing, then we have to pause and ask if perhaps the movement is getting things backwards. Mamdani, for example, would have had zero chance of winning the mayoralty without the Palestinian movement that preceded and helped give birth to his rise.

For our movement to win, it has to start with the demands of Palestinians—that is, from below—and not with the demands that will be okay with the most moderate members of the New York City Council or various business roundtables that advise a mayor.

In terms of what is to be done, I think the main task for the Left globally remains the same, and that is developing a strategy based on regional solidarity from below, opposing Western states and Israel on one side while also opposing regional authoritarian states like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, the UAE, etc. and the political forces that are linked to them. We need a strategy based on class struggle from below as the only means for liberating the people of the Middle East. Inside of the U.S., that means the continuation of exposure campaigns, like BDS, within our unions and schools and on our campuses and in our neighborhoods. It means engaging in campaigns like Break the Bonds, which is trying to get cities like New York and elsewhere to divest pension funds and other holdings from Israel and is a way of organizing within our unions, workplaces, and neighborhoods. It means organizing within Block the Bombs to go after legislation that allows for continued U.S. support for Israel.

These are means of building infrastructures of dissent and going beyond mobilizing people for a one-off protest for Palestine. We use these campaigns and networks to activate and work with people who are going to be organizing on a deeper level within schools, unions, and neighborhoods to move these demands forward. Organizing on the ground is so crucial right now because we have to create bridges into movement, into organizing for all. So many people have hit the streets over the last two years. But people can’t be hitting the streets in perpetuity every weekend for their entire lives.

There also need to be vehicles and means for people to continue to deepen their politics. Educational events like what we are doing or what JVP is doing, educational events and other spaces where there are actually human beings coming together, hopefully in person but sometimes on Zoom, to strategize and discuss what are we going to do about this problem now that we understand it in this way.

If people are simply being summoned to act, we are not talking about a movement with any potential to build leadership, to build street cred, and to develop really serious tentacles that will be able to ultimately topple and sever this relationship that we’ve been protesting for so long.

Finally, at this moment in time, with rising fascism and the very real likelihood of troops on more and more American streets, it’s the responsibility of leftists within the Palestine movement to make the very clear connections between the organizing that we do around Palestine and the organizing we do to push back on attacks against our immigrant siblings on the streets of our own cities. Integrating within rapid response networks is part of the responsibility of our movement. These networks, after all, are going out there to oppose the police and ICE who were trained where? In Israel.

When we say that Palestine exposes so many of the threads of U.S. empire and everything that is wrong with it and capitalism, it’s not rhetorical. It’s quite real. And so, the linking of our movements and struggles in real time as we face fascism is something that we have a political responsibility to help manifest.

A New York City teacher: Thank you. I’ll try my best to follow up those two excellent presentations.

I’m a member of the Tempest NYC branch, and before that, I was a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) for a number of years. I’m a veteran NYC teacher and union activist. . I’m also a member of the Movement of Rank and File Educators, a caucus within the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

I’m going to focus this talk on building within the workplace in particular. I think there could be a separate talk about building a caucus of organized activists across workplaces, but my talk is going to focus more on how we relate to coworkers in our own workplaces.

Our Marxist tradition has always understood trade unions to be important schools of struggle for the working class. They do play a dual role in that they provide the structure for workers to fight back, but they require a union bureaucracy, which inherently plays a conservatizing role, seeking to mediate between workers and their bosses. However, as rank and file activists, we don’t face the same limitations. We have a unique ability to use union structures in a way that raises the consciousness of all of our coworkers, while also aiming to convince the most conscious and active members of the necessity of revolutionary socialist politics.

Within our workplaces, we aim to be the most consistent, strategic, and effective fighters around immediate issues that affect every single one of our members. Our role as socialists is often to build our members’ confidence, encouraging them to take a step in the direction of collective action. As part of this process, we build democratic spaces in which all voices are heard and collective strategy can be hashed out.

Our coworkers will see this as a sharp contrast to the bureaucratic way in which the larger union as a whole operates. For the UFT, when we have meetings of our most democratic body, the Delegate Assembly, it’s the president speaking for 40 minutes, and there’s ten minutes of discussion. But when I run my chapter meetings, I’m not giving any big presentation.Instead, I’m opening up the space for collective discussion and providing minutes and notes. It’s just a totally different model. And the way the UFT often trains chapter leaders is just to provide information to their members and not open up the space for discussion.

At this moment within the UFT, and probably within many other unions, most workers, including those that hold left-wing and progressive ideas, feel that the best way to improve their working conditions and to preserve their job is to simply keep their head down and essentially kiss up to their bosses. The majority of workers do see the union as an ally. However, they tend to hope that someone in the union can hold the bosses to account on their behalf. They don’t see the collective role of themselves and their coworkers as essential in the process, and in fact, the very source that gives or can give unions hold their power.

Therefore, in this context, one of our most important roles as union activists is to start to organize our coworkers to take small steps and struggle. Whether we officially act as a shop steward or chapter leader or not, we should aim to find allies among the most conscious and active union members to strategically discuss the next collective action that could be taken. And we should train those allies to listen and to respond to our coworkers. It’s a magic thing. When coworkers see some collective action lead to success, their confidence starts to build, and they’re more likely to get involved in future actions.

Recently, the school where I teach tried to push something that we were getting paid for as an afterschool activity into our school day. And by having a collective response, we had a consultation committee meeting and raised the issue in several different ways, we actually got the school to concede. For us, that was an example of a concrete victory, but it could be small things like pushing back against excessive paperwork or too-large class sizes.

The next action we take could be small, like wearing a color in solidarity with a strike happening elsewhere, organizing several members to speak out about an issue at a faculty meeting, or convincing a coworker to take on a new organizing role or even just to come to the union meeting. Or it could be bigger like staging a before-work picket and a collective walk-in. It could be signing a statement in direct opposition to a supervisor or organizing a contract campaign that leads to a strike. As socialists, we all know the most effective action would be a strike. Unfortunately that is not always possible because we have to convince our coworkers to take that action.

So, our job as workplace organizers is to learn to find the next link in the chain that will move our coworkers to take action around a broadly felt idea. And it’s in our commitment to the process of building the muscles to struggle that we differ from other union activists. As we do this work, we don’t withhold our political ideas. We raise them throughout the process, and we try to build political relationships, especially with our most conscious coworkers.

Being involved in collective action provides opportunities to draw political lessons. One that I’m looking at in particular, which is very broadly felt right now in New York City, is the attempt to push a mandated curriculum on a lot of teachers. It’s a big issue in the elementary schools, and I think there’s an expectation among some of our coworkers that once Mamdani gets elected, it’s just going to go away. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s going to require collective action. I’ve already started that conversation with some of my coworkers.

Within the reform movement of the UFT, we’ve been part of an ongoing debate about whether union activists should focus more or less solely on workplace issues or also fight around issues of racism and those issues that affect our students and our community as a whole. Usually the forces that make the first argument have the goal of accumulating the most votes in union elections and holding their positions. But we believe that our ability to take collective action is more important than who holds union office.

The lesson of the 1968 racist teacher strike in New York City that pitted teachers against the black community’s demand for more control is that we cannot be effective in winning bread and butter demands unless we ally with parents and the community. We will not be able to win our demands without linking them to what our students and our community need, whether it’s smaller classes, protection from ICE, the end of over-testing and the scripted curriculum, which also hurts our students, protection from attacks on our own professionalism.

The supposed dichotomy between workplace and larger political issues is a false one, and in my experience in multiple schools, being an open socialist has never limited my role or my ability to play a leadership role within union chapters. People who may disagree with me on many issues see that our strategy is actually the most effective in winning demands in the workplace. They also understand that I don’t impose upon the chapter my own views. I open up the democratic floor for discussion, but I don’t withhold my politics.

In sum, we should see our role as union activists as trying to pull more and more people, more and more of our coworkers, into collective action that builds power and confidence while simultaneously convincing our coworkers of the need to broaden our struggle to defend other exploited and oppressed peoples. Without these concrete acts, we can’t ultimately convince others of the need for revolutionary socialist politics.

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Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Adam Pomerinke; modified by Tempest.